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Thu, Oct. 12th, 2006, 03:08 pm Subversive, nay deviant

I have discovered that Java becomes a far less odious environment to program in if I use Eclipse.

I have ... issues with using IDEs in general - mainly because I dislike anything that forces me to work its way rather than letting me adapt it to work my way (see also: Macs) but in this case the alternative is far to horrible to comprehend.

For that reason I shall decline from making snide comments about languages that need IDEs to stem the flow of hate - suffice to say that one should never try and write a Win32 MFC program without Visual Studio if one is to remain in any way sane. Also I shall refrain from adding that I feel that the whole distasteful issue has quite a lot in common with some very sensible things that the ever estimable Mr Dominus has been saying.

A further bit of advice - I struggled for a while attempting to use the Tortoise SVN plugin for Eclipse. If you ever find yourself in such a situation might I humbly suggest that you forget that such a thing exists and proceed immediately to Subclipse instead.

This is very well-timed, from my point of view, since I've just become involved in a large Java project, the developers of which all use Eclipse, and whose source is stored in SVN. I had installed Toroise, but I will now forget that such a thing exists, and proceed immediately to Subclipse instead.

The only problem I found with Subclipse is that should you want to change anything about your setup you are kind of stuffed (don't try to move a server while working on source at the same time, you would think it should be easy, just change the address of the repos. but no, can't do that ... time to backup source somewhere else, delete the project, get the old project from new SVN server location then copy over the new changes and then you can commit changes).

I personally find Eclipse suffers very much from the problem that it was written to be used in a specific way and if you deviate from it, woe unto thee. But of course the IDE is much smarter than the person using it ...

"Eclipse makes my life SO MUCH easier" than handcoding the bytecode.... than using vim to write the ".java" file in.... than using another IDE (such as NetBeans)... than having someone else code the thing for you.

The question is - how much did you have to change to accommodate the IDE ?

I have added to my RSS reader, so that your words and deeds may be ground and mashed along with the sugar of gossip and spices of current affairs to create the a linguistic linguini... a tart of topical titbits... the greatest informational pudding known to humanity.